Email   Print   Share By Sgt. 1st Class Gail Braymen, Div. West Public Affairs

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Capt. Stacy Lardizabal (center), intelligence officer of Div. West’s 191st Inf. Bde., assists a role-played Afghan police officer in a briefing during training for Lardizabal’s Security Force Assistance Advisor Team at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., July 19. Sgt. 1st Class Gail Braymen, Div. West Public Affairs

Col. Shawn Reed (right), commander of Div. West’s 191st Inf. Bde., talks with role-played Afghan National Army officers through an interpreter during training for Reed’s Security Force Assistance Advisor Team at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., July 19. Sgt. 1st Class Gail Braymen, Div. West Public Affairs

FORT POLK, La. - Deep in the tall piney woods and steamy summer heat of the Joint Readiness Training Center here, a team of First Army Division West Soldiers is preparing to make history.

Ranging in rank from a staff sergeant to a full-bird colonel, and comprised of both women and men, the Soldiers – all from Division West’s 191st Infantry Brigade at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Wash. – are a Security Force Assistance Advisor Team.

In just a few weeks, in direct support of the U.S. shift from kinetic to advisory operations in Afghanistan, the SFA AT will deploy to Regional Command-East. But not to go out on patrols in search of insurgents – to work side-by-side with their counterparts in the Afghan army, police and border police as advisors.

“It’s a decisive shift, and it’s a critical shift,” said Col. Shawn Reed, commander of the 191st Infantry Brigade and leader of the SFA AT. “The transition to putting (Afghan National Security Forces) in the lead … is the critical aspect of success or not in Afghanistan. Being part of that is historic.”

The Division West SFA AT deployment is historic on another level, too.

“First Army hasn’t deployed into a theater of operation as an organization since World War II,” Reed said. “We’re proud of our heritage, proud of our history, and we’re proud to be representing First Army in this fight in Afghanistan.”

Every year, First Army’s two divisions – West and East – train tens of thousands of National Guard, Reserve and active-duty Soldiers, plus Airmen, Sailors and Marines, for deployments to Afghanistan and other theaters of operation. The SFA AT mission is a natural one for the First Army “training machine,” Reed said.

“The 191st Infantry Brigade was called up to provide expertise in the arena of advising and training,” Reed explained. “Of course, that parallels closely with what we do on a day-to-day basis with our reserve component and active component training mission, our enduring mission for First Army.”

Reed’s team is the seventh SFA AT supplied by Division West, and the unit is already preparing Soldiers for future SFA AT rotations. All together, the nine Division West Soldiers on Reed’s team already have more than 30 deployments under their belts.

“This is another in a long line, but this one with the 191st is special,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Woods, whose first of nine previous deployments was Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada in 1983. “On a personal level, it is kind of neat that I get to take a unit out that hasn’t been out the door since World War II.”

Woods is the 191st Infantry Brigade’s command sergeant major, but in the SFA AT, he is in charge of personnel and administrative duties. He is also the team’s unofficial historian, and he is quick to point out that their mission is really nothing new in American military history.

Woods cited the example of Baron von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who trained Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army Soldiers during the Revolutionary War using an innovative “train the trainer” method still used today.

Von Steuben also developed a program of military camp sanitation that remained the American standard for 150 years, and served as Washington’s chief of staff in the last years of the war.

“Baron von Steuben was an SFA AT – an advisor – to the U.S. Army 237 years ago. We still reference his work today,” Woods said. “The SFA AT mission that’s happening now – one of the team members on some team, somewhere, will eventually be the Afghan von Steuben. What that Soldier does will be so significant … that (Afghans) will reference him from here on out.”

The Division West SFA AT is one of more than 250 teams to go through the 162nd Infantry Brigade’s Security Force Assistance Course at Fort Polk since January, according to Maj. Conrad Schupay, deputy operations officer for the 162nd.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge for the advisor teams is to step back and let someone else be in charge.

“As we transition from combat operations, Afghans have got to take the lead,” Schupay said. “Americans are there to advise, but not to do the job for them.”

Maj. Michael Doyle, who has previously deployed three times to Iraq, has a dual role in the Division West SFA AT as executive officer and operations

officer.

The biggest challenge for their team, he believes, is that they will get to work with their Afghan counterparts for only a short time.

“There are limitations to what we can accomplish in nine months,” Doyle said, “but we have to look at long-range strategy.

“Even after we’re gone, what we do has to last,” he said.

Nine months is also a short time to become fluent in the customs and courtesies of a foreign culture, so the SFA ATs get a head start on that learning process at Fort Polk.

During the eight days of their initial intensive coursework, SFA AT Soldiers spend their mornings in the classroom and the afternoons applying that day’s lessons to interactions with role-played Afghan police, army and border police officials.